Abstract

Aziridine is a kind of highly toxic organic matter, while it is used as a leather finishing cross-linker at room temperature, especially used in water-borne acrylic resins and aqueous polyurethane. In this work, a straightforward, reliable and effective automated method has been developed for the direct determination of aziridine in leathers, based on headspace technique. Separation, identification and quantification were carried out by headspace-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (HS-GC-MS) in selected ion monitoring (SIM) mode. The precision was satisfactory with relative standard deviations (RSD) in the range 1.7%-4.1% for leathers. Limit of detection was 0.1mg kg-1 for leathers.